That's the Spirit!
Our pet God and other signs of these fallen times
By Susan Maushart

          I don't usually think of myself as the spiritual type, even though I went with some friends to a channeller recently to have our essential life-force energies read. They all turned out to be earth/air or wind/fire people. I turned out to be a lint/filter person. Yet every once in a while my spiritual side does become engaged (although mostly it's happy just dating). Just now, for instance, I find that there is an image of the Resurrection I simply can't get out of my mind. It was on an Easter card my daughter received from her best friend, lovingly drawn and painstakingly hand-colored. There was a round yellow sun and tufts of green grass. There were speckled eggs in a bright blue basket. And there was an Easter bunny, nailed to the cross. 
          "Didn't Laura do a great job?" my daughter asked proudly. "She certainly chose age-appropriate colors, darling," I agreed, stalling for time. "But what do you think of the Easter bunny?" she persisted. "Don't you think there's something a bit strange about it?" I shrugged and pretended to examine the crayoned stigmata more closely. "Be honest," she continued. "Don't you think he should be wearing a white skirt like Jesus does?"
          Kids are such sticklers for historical accuracy. Because I now wanted to conclude the conversation very badly, I asked my daughter what she thought the artist was trying to convey. "It means 'new life,' Mum," she answered, rather impatiently. "Oh, that's nice, anyway," I said. "I'm glad the bunny has a happy ending." "Not the bunny," she corrected, in the strained tones of someone trying to explain the nuances of Resurrection theology to a lint/filter person. "The bunny's dead. Finished."
          "Well, where does the new life bit come in then?" I ventured timidly. She thought about this for a moment before replying. "Doesn't it have something to do with sex, Mum?"
          I recalled a wedding I once attended where the celebrant - a pompous High Church Anglican who, like all pompous High Church Anglicans, sounded uncannily like William F. Buckley wearing really tight underwear - experienced a similar confusion. No one actually knew how it happened, because it was a very lengthy service, and the congregation had long since become absorbed in the critical examination of the cuticles and enlarged pores of the brethren sitting closest to them. 
          I remember there was a lot of praising going on. The priest praised Jesus's life and works. He praised His birth and Apgar. But - and I think this is a really sad statement on the state of the Church today - it wasn't until he praised Our Lord's "glorious erection" that anybody really got excited. 
          For me personally, this unholy slip of the tongue constituted a genuine religious experience. Because, in a miracle which made the raising of Lazarus look like a cheap party trick, not a single member of that congregation so much as snorted. Or so they told me later, after I'd been led out to the street for oxygen. Apparently, it wasn't until the priest got to the part about how "we await your coming in glory" that all hell broke loose. 
          Well, let's face it. Christian theology is confusing even for the faithful. The Lord works in mysterious ways - and His annual vacation entitlements are also a little odd. Today we live in a post-Christian age, which is, I suppose, a shorthand way of saying that we reject the Virgin Birth but would prefer to keep the shower presents. This is understandable, yet it also leads to certain difficulties, of which resuscitating a dead bunny may prove to be the least.
          When I was a child, we kept more to the orthodoxies. Mass was still said in Latin in those days, a language even deader than the beady-eyed fox fur clipped to my mother's shoulders. From time to time I would catch something about a girl named Agnes Day - a sister of Doris perhaps? - but much to my disappointment she never seemed to materialize. Luckily, we girls had our prayerbooks to read, if the going got too tough up front. Later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I begged my mother to send mine to Castro. Vatican II was a direct consequence of her refusal to do so, from which point the church as we know it ceased to exist. 
          Yet sometimes, when I listen to the innocent voices of my children, I take heart (followed by a good serotonin re-uptake inhibitor). I experienced such a moment just the other day, when they were discussing what names they might give their new guinea pigs. Sugarlump? I suggested to the four-year-old. Snowflake, maybe? "Nah. I want to name mine God," she announced serenely.
          "Gee, I wish I'd thought of that instead of 'Sweathog,'" her brother grumbled. "God is a fantastic name!" her sister agreed. "Whatever made you think of it?" 
          "'Cause we donít really know if it's a boy or a girl, of course."
          Okay, okay, so they may be a little confused about the details. But they've got the basics down, and in these fallen times you can't ask for more than that.

About the author:
The mother of three young children, SUSAN MAUSHART holds three degrees in communication arts and sciences, including a Ph.D. from New York University. Susan migrated to Australia from the U.S. in 1986 where, among other positions, she has worked as a communications consultant, stand-up comedy writer, and academic. In 1994, her first book, Sort of a Place Like Home, a history of the Moore River Native Settlement, won the Festival Prize for Literature (non-fiction) at the Adelaide Writers Festival. Her second book, the bestselling The Mask of Motherhood, was hailed by the Sunday Times of London as "a feminist classic."
Susan is a Senior Research Associate in the School of Social Sciences at Curtin University, and her essays and reviews have appeared in a host of Australian and international publications. She is currently a featured columnist in the Australian Magazine.

"Nietzsche was wrong. God is not dead. S/he is only dozing in the West Australian sun, atop a pile of pea straw. Although we know for certain that God is great - I'm talking a really easy pet - on the gender thing, we reserve the right to remain agnostic."

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